The theme of the 2011 Linguistic Institute is Language in the World. The Institute focus is on interdisciplinary, empirically based approaches to language that acknowledge its dual nature, as both a real-time interactional strategy and a product of interaction. A diverse array of courses were provided that emphasized the contributions of data-intensive research to theories of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, phonetics, phonology and their interactions, and provided training in an array of research tools, including acoustic analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, ethnography, computational and statistical modeling, corpus analysis and various types of fieldwork.

An Institute focus is the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages, with courses that will survey methodologies and available tools and resources. In addition to offering core linguistics courses, we offered courses that combine linguistic theory with perspectives derived from psychology, computer science, anthropology and other related disciplines and that apply linguistic theory to practical endeavors like lexicography, natural language processing and language teaching.